SEO value of affiliate external links
-
There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link"
I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.
-
I see a ton of churn with small, boutique merchants, and even the large ones have been grumbling lately about not wanting to support certain types of websites. I think it really depends on how effectively you're able to leverage your publishers, but as with everything you get a lot of merchants who join up with no idea how to do that.
-
This is how I see it work in practice when a merchant closes their ShareASale program:
our nice clean cloaked link --303--> shareasale affiliate link --302--> Destination URL (status code 200)
Assuming that the links you're seeing aren't cloaked, even if the user who clicks on an old ShareASale affiliate link does in fact land on your site, they're still getting pushed to the destination page through a 302. So there's not going to be much SEO value in these links, if there's any at all.
In our case, when a SAS program dies, the destination page is the front page of our site, not the merchant's site. This may be an account setting somewhere within our publisher account or something customizable, but it's not something the merchant gets to control.
-
Hi Nicholas,
To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.
In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.
In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.
I hope that helps a bit!
Paddy
-
I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.
Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.
However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.
Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.
-
The links ARE setup like this Link to your product
I am confused on how it knows to briefly direct to Shareasale. In this source code there is nothing that looks out of place. It looks like a completely normal link except it does contain the verbiage class="external-link" other than that it looks regular. These links are ALSO showing up in webmaster tools as DO FOLLOW.
-
A link can't be direct to your site, then refer back to shareasale, then redirect back to your site unless you've set it up that way somehow.
So if someone builds a shareasale link like:
This is going to shareasale. If you quit shareasale and they said it would still go directly to you, they're just not planting their tracking cookie on the intermediate step. Everything else would remain the same.
If the link is something like:
Link to product and somehow that goes from your site, to shareasale, back to your site - well that's definitely not helping you very much for SEO and if you quit, yes that would then go directly to your site - but only if you reconfigured how the links were working since this type of linking would require a lot of special work to make it happen. It's more likely it's the 1st example.
In any case, they both pass through Shareasale and, per Matt Cutts, Google is attempting to not give you credit for that link. Whether or not they do, I can't say - but they're attempting not to. I'm not sure which part of my previous answer may not be "completely true."
-
I am not sure if this is completely true, however I contacted Shareasale about these links. I asked them if I were to close my Shareasale account, they said the link would then just directly go to me. The anchor link is indeed directly pointing to my site. I am not sure how google can read that it is affiliate looking at source code alone?
-
Matt is correct, link as redirect from affiliate site doesn't pass link juice, but it does count as a link with several other search engines, such as Bing usually do pass. Also I am strong believer in Matt Cutts theory, but he hasn't been part of Google for quite some times, Google is rolling out unnamed algorithms, meaning everything is possible specially if you are finding those links in webmaster search console.
-
These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.
Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:
Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.
To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Link Building Strategy?
If I use unique content written from writers & post it to good sites (free blogs, bookmarking, directory, articles sites, etc.) having nice good cache, good PR, different IP's do i still have a chance of get hit by Spam actions of google? Planning to do like just 30-50 a month all with unique content or say 1 unique content then re-written & used not more than 3 times. If not this then What else would you suggest? One more thing to add up, like i have 1000+ pages out of which i have like 80-90 pages that matters to me (important pages) then how do I spin the anchor text between all the pages. Should i spin them between 1000+ pages or use only 80-90 IMP pages. If the content is 300 words let say then how many anchor tags should i have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Link Audit - Sponsor/Partners Images Links
Hi everyone, 1. I'm conducting a link audit and read that if you are a sponsor or partner of a company, links should be nofollowed. I always no follow them if they are money keywords, but branded I leave alone. is that a good strategy? Or do i nofollow my brand name as well? 2. What if I'm a sponsor and have my company logo on their website that links to my website? How would i know if that link should be nofollowed? a. Does it depend on the "alt" of the image? b. Does it depend on the landing page of the link of the image? c. Do i just no follow image links from sponsor pages and partner pages as a whole? Please keep in mind that I'm sponsoring websites that are relevant to my niche. PLEASE HELP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Joomla SEO
With so many articles on the web talking about how difficult Joomla is to work with in regards to SEO, I'm curious as to what techniques / changes you guys make when using Joomla with your SEO / inbound practices? Any extensions that you love? An extensions that you hate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougHoltOnline0 -
Local SEO for a community.
How would one go about best doing local SEO for a townhome community? It seems to fall in between the traditional imformational SEO and the brick and mortar, G+ page model. There seems to be no way to attack the NAP, directory and traditional citation model for a certain region they build in. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AESEO0 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Could Temporarily Linking New Directory Pages to my Homepage Help SEO?
Within my website we maintain a nationwide directory of auto repair shops. When we add or significantly update / modify a particular listing, would it help improve the individual search engine rankings, Google PageRank, and / or Page Authority of the new auto shop page if we linked these pages to an area on the home page for "Our Newest Featured Shops" or "Latest Member Additions" or something of the nature? Each new shop profile would then be linked directly from the homepage for a period of time. I assume that it might be crawled and added to the indexes quicker, but would there be other benefits? If so, would those benefits only be temporary if eventually the new shop no longer linked to the homepage? Would keeping all featured shops in rotational display on the homepage make any difference? Any input is appreciated. Thanks. Kelly Vaught
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kelly_vaught0 -
E-Commerce SEO
Dear SeoMoz fans, I'm really glad to be a part of the community. Just have a quick question. I run a marketplace similar to eBay where users sell the products. I would like some suggestions on how to effectively proceed with SEO for an ecommerce marketplace of this type. Should I be proceed developing product review or product comparison landing pages and build links towards them as often suggested or should I consider alternative marketing methods? Looking forward to your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | buzzmartseo0